Integers and Infinitely Thin Lines

This is a good post on the Infinitely Thin Line by Maclin Horton of Caelum et Terra-- I came across his writing after I read Crunchy Cons.

He is pondering the same verse that struck me this year when I heard it at Mass:

And the same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together; for before they were at enmity between themselves. —Luke 23:12

which sounds to me like a dreadful judgment, as he says.

He writes, after discussing the sympathy the modern sensibility has for Pontius Pilate:

Truth and falsehood are ultimately divided by a geometric line—not the proverbial thin line, but one which has no second dimension at all. It is infinitely thin. You can’t really stand on it. There is no surface, so even if you think you’re straddling it every atom in your body is on one side or the other. You’re divided, and you can stay that way indefinitely about many questions, but not on a matter or in a circumstance that requires a decision, because in the end there is no indeterminate state between action and non-action: you may hesitate for a while, but eventually you either do, or do not.

This made me think that Pilate, the man divided, was a very contrast to Christ, the Man of integrity... integrity being defined as it relates to the Latin adjective integer -- meaning "whole, complete". Jesus is described this way, deviously but in the end truly, by the Pharisees:

Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. "Teacher," they said, "we know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren't swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?"

But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, "You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?""Caesar's," they replied. Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

This is exactly what Caiaphas, and Pilate, did not do. They did not give to Caesar what was his, and to God what was due to Him.

I am reading Chesterton's Everlasting Man, and he writes:

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilization. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece.

But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask, 'What is truth?' So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility . Yet he stands forever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgment-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.

There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away.

Horton points out that we admire the civilized, divided man -- Pilate-- much more nowadays than the narrow, calculating religious leader -- Caiaphas--- but that in fact the two kinds of personalities and outlooks united for one bitter result.

I am thinking that there are two kinds of unity -- the wholeness depicted by the word "integrity", personified by Jesus -- mind, body, heart all working together under the command of the will subordinated to what is right. This is what you see in his answer to the Pharisees, which makes clear and correct distinctions in the service of a whole Truth.

Then there is a kind of union of assimilation, that you see in the verse about Pilate and Herod, that you see in the account of Pilate and Caiaphas, and that you see in CS Lewis's Screwtape Letters -- a kind of breaking down of what is best and noblest and a collaboration in what is worst and meanest.